The must-see panel of Intersolar North America (if you could only see one) discussed the most pressing issue in distributed solar today: What’s happening with net metering – and where does the industry go from here?

At 9 am on Tuesday morning, one of the most important issues in the industry was being debated in a conference room as part of the Intersolar North America trade show: net metering.

Across the nation, net metering policies are changing. The largest solar market, California, has moved to a successor policy, while other states including Hawaii and Indiana have shut the policy down entirely.

But looking beyond the more severe instances, an exploration of different states shows a definite shift in the direction of policies that attempt to put a more precise value on the electricity exported to the grid by distributed solar, along with a move to time-of-use rates. And more often than not the shift is more incremental than a step-change.

The assembled experts attempted to grapple with these big-picture issues, fragmented as they are in the individual experiences of different states.